Ownership Before Authority: How I Built an IT Function from the Ground Up
I joined a small company in Chandigarh as the only IT person.
No team.
No structure.
No playbook.
Just me and a founder who gave me a free hand—and trusted me to figure things out.
I Started by Doing It Myself
The first thing I did was question every outside dependency.
Software. Hardware. Network infrastructure.
Whatever we were paying vendors to do, I asked:
“Can we build this ourselves?”
Most of the time, the answer was yes.
I spent countless nights in those early months learning, troubleshooting, building and fixing things with my own hands.
Not because someone asked me to.
Because I wanted to understand how everything worked before I ever asked someone else to do it.
That became my operating principle:
Do it yourself first.
Then teach it.
Then build the team around what you now understand from the inside.
From One Person to an IT Organization
When I joined, the company was tiny.
By the time I left, it had grown to around 600 people.
The IT function grew with it—from one person into dedicated teams for:
Software
Hardware
Networking
IT Operations
The founder never stopped me.
Why?
Because the results kept showing up.
Twenty years later, he is still my mentor.
I recently visited him in Chandigarh, and it reminded me how much that early trust shaped my career.
I Never Set Out to “Build an IT Function”
People sometimes ask me:
“What did you do to grow the function so quickly?”
The honest answer is:
I never thought about growing the function.
I thought about the problem in front of me.
I solved it.
Then another problem appeared.
I solved that one.
And when I couldn't hold everything alone anymore, I hired the next person.
That person learned what I had learned.
Then we built the next capability.
That is how the team grew.
Not through a grand organizational strategy.
Through ownership, execution and repetition.
Ownership Comes Before Authority
One of the biggest lessons I learned early in my career is that ownership does not come from a job title.
You don't need to be a manager to take responsibility.
You don't need a large team to create impact.
And you don't need someone watching you to do the right thing.
Real ownership shows up when:
Nobody is watching.
Nobody is asking.
And the problem still matters to you.
That's where leadership begins.
Before the promotion.
Before the title.
Before the team.
The Leadership Lesson
If you're early in your career, don't wait for someone to give you ownership.
Find the problem.
Learn it deeply.
Solve it yourself.
Document what you learn.
Teach someone else.
And when the workload becomes bigger than one person, build the team.
Don't build a team first and then look for ownership.
Build ownership first.
The team will follow.
